You’ll be subjected to rolling commentary on innumerable aspects of the Gorsuch hearings. I prefer, as I often do, to address deeper aspects of our competing value systems that underlie the surface of our political battles. One is the human impact of our treatment of planet earth.

Human behavior is injuring our environment. But nature has ways of winning the battle. It turns out that our fertility is as fragile as the eagles’ before DDT was banned, that endocrine disruptors and other environmental toxins are damaging our ability to reproduce – they’re in our kitchens, pesticides and other purchases.[1] That can be a powerful counterattack against the human activity that is warming the globe. If we become infertile and our population plummets, America will become a sad, lonely, vulnerable place, and, quite likely, conquered by any healthier peoples left.

Nevertheless, I’m sick of making consequential arguments, to tell people that if we don’t do this or that, bad things will happen. I think the arguments I’ve been making are air tight. But the science floats over people’s heads. A women, well-enough educated to know better, told me that she chose not to think about the environment because it was too big to deal with. Her comment made clear to me that reason doesn’t reach nearly enough people. Science won’t solve anything unless we accept and act on it.

So let’s address the moral issue. No one, no business, no company or corporation has the right to put toxins in the environment, chemicals that can make it impossible for people to reproduce or kill or maim those of us alive, or make us produce deformed and handicapped children – no one and no company has that right. And they don’t have the right to change the subject, throw smoke in our eyes, saying something else is the problem when they aren’t bothering to check. We’ve had enough lies. This is not a football game where deception is a winning strategy. In human life, deception is sinful, immoral, totally unacceptable. Taking risks with other people’s lives and making excuses for it is criminal.

If there is an economic problem, then, as many labor leaders have suggested for decades, let’s share the work, or create other jobs that don’t do damage – jobs aren’t an excuse for hurting people. Hurting people isn’t a job; it’s a crime. People aren’t entitled to work at criminal enterprises.

The Cabinet and the President and the Members of Congress and the state and local governments aren’t entitled to commit the crime of murder by poisoning the environment. Pro-lifers and liberals should be united on the environmental front given the enormity of the killing, of adults, children, fetuses and sperm. We’ve all seen multiple films with populations at risk and the starship or other craft working hard to prevent destruction of civilizations. The authors of those stories were trying to portray the immorality of destroying civilizations, and they were warning us of the likelihood that we would face that problem.

How many of us are moral enough to deal with this issue? Isn’t it criminal to support the rape of the air, land, food and water that give us life? Isn’t it criminal to carelessly poo-poo the dangers? How many of our corporate and elected officials are criminals?

Those with so little respect for the lives of fellow human beings must repent, stop and stop those who do, immediately and completely.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 21, 2017.

I want to focus on a serious issue that is being ignored in favor of all kinds of fake news and grandstanding. In college, I took a course on demography. That means we were looking at the explosion of population in parts of the world, which then leveled off, but at much higher levels than before. Everything we are struggling with in this twenty-first century is related to that explosion of population.

The most significant advances in our longevity were the result of public health advances, precisely the things that people don’t want to spend on right now, on our water and sewer systems. I remember my dad asking every owner of places where we stopped for the night whether the water was potable, meaning it was drinking water from which we would not get sick. That was new in his lifetime. And by the way, my dad grew up in Brooklyn, in New York City, using an outhouse. Sure many of us have used outhouses at one time or another but they are not the best protection for public health in large communities – septic systems take lots of space.

After water and sewer systems, penicillin probably made the biggest difference – it’s probably why I’m talking with you today but never met my sister who died at the age of three before the discovery of penicillin. Those advances added decades to our lives by comparison to very short advances from modern medicine and surgery.

And they are a large part of the problem of global warming. There are lots more of us burning things, driving cars, using electricity, getting what we need for business or pleasure from the furthest corners of the world. That takes energy. Energy has been produced by burning things. And so the world gets hotter, the oceans expand, tropical diseases proliferate, and life threatens to get nasty, brutish and short once again. And efforts to mitigate that will be overtaken if population continues to expand – worldwide it’s doubled in my lifetime.

So when I hear about advances in medical science, like the possible elimination of malaria, I think how wonderful for the likely victims, and then I wonder about the global impact. There is no free lunch. We can make lots of advances. But the world has its limits. More people will put more stress on the environment. And stress on the environment is already heading us toward the next major extinction – us, human beings, our children and grandchildren.

And so I think there is a trade-off between our health and our numbers. There is no human life after we are extinguished – only death and tears. So let’s be clear, I am very pro-life, but to be pro-life demands support for birth control, especially the kinds that prevent conception.

There is no so-called pro-life position that is not also a position about death. It seems to me that The Church and all houses of worship, must rethink their positions about death and destruction along with their positions about conception. The two are intertwined by laws well-beyond our ability to control. Yes the Bible says choose life, all our bibles say that in some form. But are we choosing life if we ignore the reality of death, destruction, and extinction?

The environment is the crux of emerging industry. It doesn’t just enable us to breathe better and protect our children’s lives. It is a growing industry which America could dominate if we tried. It is and will be crucial to housing materials, and protecting existing investments of all kinds. Places and countries that don’t protect their environments will not attract entrepreneurs, workers or investments. Their infrastructure will clog along with people’s lungs.

And as it becomes cheaper solar and wind make other industries possible – sun and wind don’t charge by the hour. Falling behind in environmental infrastructure means disaster, abandoned communities if they don’t first fall into the sea.

As simple a gesture as writing land-planning rules so that new construction has the best orientation to the sun cuts expenses forever. Supporting science, instead of taking scientific findings off government websites, will lead to other helpful steps America could take. Plus everything we do for the environment will depend on putting people to work to get it done.

Yes I know, there are shifts in world temperatures that are not man made. New York was once covered with a huge sheet of ice. Nevertheless, we also know, independently, that carbon and methane are driving global warming. Even if natural processes affect the temperature of our world, mankind is making it much worse. We could take action to bring that down unless we put our heads firmly in the sand. Fighting to minimize climate change is good for the economy. Losing that fight isn’t. It means rescuing people, pulling them away from the coasts, crowding them into smaller less productive areas. More than that, it means that many of the places we live will become uninhabitable. Only the mortuaries will do well.

I once chatted with an engineer about the effects of climate change. I knew that his house is in New York City, only 8 feet above sea level and not far from the coast. So I suggested he move to higher ground. He responded that if the sea rose 8 feet, New York City would be unlivable. The infrastructure of the city wouldn’t work. Roads and streets would be submerged or collapse. It wouldn’t be worth staying even on higher ground. So I suggested moving up here – the Hudson may be at sea level but most of us are much higher than that. His response was chilling but one would be a fool to assume he was wrong. He said that none of us would be safe if 8 million New Yorkers, or more from the metropolitan area or the East Coast, became refugees. Wow. His point is that if large numbers of us become desperate, and remember that most Americans live near the coasts, then all bets are off.

Remember the resistance in Congress to repairing the damage from Sandy. That doesn’t even compare to the costs of a rising sea.

So fighting climate change is good for jobs, protects us from economic collapse, and gives our children and grandchildren something to live for. That’s a heck of a worthwhile investment, and a collective, patriotic goal.

Looking at the New Year, there are two existential challenges that must be dealt with: global climate change and the threat to American democracy.

Global climate change has to be at the top of the agenda because scientists are telling us we are crossing tipping points. What is a tipping point? It is the point where the damage already done makes the process go out of control. You can’t stop a bomb once it starts – the explosion takes over. And tipping points are being crossed. As arctic ice melts, it’s not just that the earth got warmer already, it’s that the highly reflective ice was reflecting heat back into space and isn’t there to do that any more so without humans doing anything more, global warming speeds up. That’s a tipping point. Other tipping points are in the oceans and the food chain. Climate change threatens real doom, a mass extinction, and the creatures to be extinguished this time are us. So go ahead and throw your grandchildren into the fire and then see if you’re allowed into heaven. Folks, if we send our grandchildren to hell you can be sure that we’ll be right there burning with them.

American democracy is at risk because a foreign power has seen that it is possible to manipulate American elections and an American candidate has seen that it is possible to manipulate the people who are prepared to put weapons in the service of their hatred. And if Trump is half as venal as I think he is, and follows the path of demagogues and dictators, he will bribe members of Congress in order to have his way and to stay in office. Even worse, if he follows the pattern of dictators and demagogues, he will try to distract America with a war. I don’t want to think about the mem, women and children who will lose their lives for the glory of Trump!

We are not in good hands. Americans could be put to work to deal with the environment, build and rebuild our infrastructure, handle real threats to our country and to each other. But to save a few more dollars for the richest among us, people will not be put to work doing the things we need and the richest won’t have to share to take care of our country. That’s kleptocracy folks, it’s precisely the kind of behavior that we expect from Putin and the world’s most bloodthirsty dictators.

No, we are not in good hands because the evil in the Manhattan tower is a greedy grabber of money and power, a denier of global warming, corruption, how the economy works, and the common good.

This is a crisis as serious as World War II – an existential crisis. Will America survive, never mind greatness, if we succumb to a dictator? Will humanity survive, never mind flourish, if global climate change makes refugees and cadavers of us all – and who’ll take in refugees then? What will we do to reign in global warming, protect American democracy, and preserve the country we were blessed with?

Remember ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. We will be strangers – on the planet.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 10, 2017.

Let me begin by reminding you of Trump’s claims,[1] and end with some questions.

“I’m totally pro-choice” he declared and then took it back: “I’m pro-life” and told MSNBC that “there has to be some form of punishment” for a woman who has an abortion, later modified that only the doctor should be responsible. Plus he supported Planned Parenthood, and defunding them.

Remember the poor woman in Providence whose house was taken under eminent domain? “Eminent domain is wonderful” he told Fox News, and within a month told another outlet, “I don’t like eminent domain.”

He told CNN “I’m an environmentalist,” but tweeted “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”

He once “support[ed] the ban on assault weapons and … a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.” but “I don’t support it anymore.” Now he says he’s “the strongest person running in favor of the Second Amendment.”

In 2000 he said “We must have universal health care” but his campaign website read “It is not enough to simply repeal this terrible legislation,” and says he’d substitute “free market principles” on health care.

On taxes, in 2015 he described his tax plan as “a big tax reduction, including for the upper income.” On May 5 he told CNBC “I am not necessarily a huge fan of” cutting taxes for billionaires.

It’s not clear who Trump likes as people. First he refused to denounce the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalists supporting him. Under fire he reversed course but many white supremacists, including David Duke, continue to support Trump. He’s blown hot and cold on refugees: “on a humanitarian basis, he said, “you have to” take in Syrian refugees. But now he wouldn’t. “I love Hispanics!” he tweeted on Cinco de Mayo, pictured with a taco bowl. Except of course that he wants to build a wall and send them all back to Mexico.

Donald thinks military policy is a cinch, “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. … I think I know most of it anyway.” He waffles on whether he would trust the Russians or not. He liked NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which unites Europe and the U.S. militarily. “I see NATO as a good thing” he said recently but six days later decided “NATO is obsolete.”

The Middle East befuddles him. He supported invading Iraq. and crowed that “It looks like a tremendous success” but four days after that said, “The war’s a mess.”

He supported fighting in Libya: “Qadhafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers, all over the Middle East, and we’re not bringing ‘em in to stop this horrible carnage. … We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.” But he said later, “I never discussed that subject.… We would be so much better off if Qadhafi were in charge right now.”

What are we supposed to make of Trump’s contradictions and about-faces? Does the adjective he uses endlessly to describe Hillary fit Trump better? Does he know what he’s talking about? I’m more interested in how we decide what he’s for? He’s inviting people to buy their own dreams. Whatever you’re for, he wants you to think he is too. Selling people their own dreams is a great sales tactic. It’s natural to believe others think like us. But if we guess wrong, who wants to be Donald’s sucker?

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, May 31, 2016.

Let’s talk about immigration in this current frenzy about keeping Syrian refugees out.

DAESH (ISIS) or al Qaeda used EU citizens to damage Paris. They will try to use Americans here. Some Americans have gone over to the dark side, trained abroad, could return and blend in here. That is a similar problem with deporting those undocumented people who have spent most of their lives here – in their countries of origin many have no ties, job history, knowledge of the culture or the environment. Deported, they are valuable to smugglers who use them to get contraband across our borders. Allowed to stay, they could be productive members of society. For Americans and immigrants alike, keeping people working at decent jobs is the best way to keep everyone out of trouble.

Population also affects national power, what we can produce, and the power we project. That is important in an increasingly dangerous world. Adding to the workforce and as consumers, immigrants increase the size and health of our economy, and instead of straining our budget, they help to sustain our social safety net, as many aging countries have been finding out.

Immigration is not without costs, however. China and India now each have over a billion people. India’s population has tripled since I was young. These are population explosions. Chinese authorities understood that China could not sustain population growth and slowed it precipitously.

Moving people from places where they live in fear to an America where they can live in peace and prosperity is neutral with respect to worldwide population. But it may do environmental damage if it means changing to an environmentally more destructive lifestyle. That makes it doubly important to control, limit and reduce environmental damage. It means that we should, must, continue to invest in ways to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and increase our use of solar and wind energy and passive solar heating. We must control our overuse of water, and invest in better ways to use it. We need to rethink our national land-use policies – it makes little sense to irrigate deserts for farmland and build suburbs on productive lands. We are shifting farmland from places that have plenty of water to those that don’t. That is not only wasteful, it also leads to drought, salinization of the land, and makes other settled places unlivable, save at the enormous cost of desalinization of seawater.

Ultimately both our goals for immigration and our goals for America, our children and grandchildren must be driven by concern for the people who will inhabit it. That means care and concern for the immigrants themselves, and care for everyone, those we are strongly attached to and all the people of the earth, expressed through environmental policies that can keep the earth habitable. In that effort we all have to be willing to share and accept effective regulation. There is no other way.

And yes, protecting the lives of our children and grandchildren requires some sacrifice. But aren’t the sacrifices we make for those we deeply care about one of the most satisfying things we get to do? All our faiths confirm those duties and affirm the joy of giving and caring. It’s hard to think of people as deserving who are unwilling to share in the general sacrifices for their and our offspring.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 5, 2016.

Help. Two major problems have the same structure – it doesn’t look like people will deal with the problem until it is too late. Too late means the survivors will be refugees. Everyone else will be dead. And yet getting people to deal with the threat except at the fringes has been impossible.

One of those problems is global climate change. I’m told people will come around. Great but time is not on our side. I’m told people don’t want to make any sacrifices. Great. Life is a sacrifice. We sacrifice for everything we want. How about life? For us? Our kids and grandchildren? Isn’t that worth a few pennies? What’s the matter?

We could deal with this. It’s not rocket science. Changes to the tax system would push carbon out of the air. And some regulation would clean up other parts of the problem. Is life itself, for everybody we love, not worth some sacrifice? Can’t we make it clear to everybody in this election season that anything less than a full-court, all-out press to call a halt to global warming is the sine qua non of our support, the one overriding issue, and they’d better do everything they can?

Time might have been on our side when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in 1962, Barry Commoner called attention to environmental threat of global pollution in the late 1960s, and we held the first Earth Day in 1970. That was 46 years ago. Time is not on our side now. Action is crucial now; we need to do everything possible to make the system move. Corporations that hide behind the bad-for-business apologias deserve boycotts. Everybody’s shoulders need to go to all the wheels – now.

The same dynamic underlies Israel’s miscalculation of its own position. It has now lost or is in the process of losing all its allies. The majority there has been stubborn and stupid in denying that they needed to make any changes. But it’s become obvious to many more than those of us who’ve been crying in the wilderness for years. I know I’ll get hate mail – people cover up their own blindness by refusing to see and blaming everyone else around. Sorry. That won’t help. The problem isn’t me; it’s that the world has lost patience and it doesn’t particularly matter now if the world is right or wrong. Israel never had a future without allies and Israel has been squandering its erstwhile friends. It’s bet on the Republicans has only revealed the loss of support across the American political spectrum. So will Israel go the way of the Crusades? It will take a lot of far-sighted savvy to stave that off and I doubt their politics will permit it.

Two very different problems and yet two problems that are very similar. Meanwhile, I sit down to write some commentary, and here, two problems close to my heart are looking intractable and I don’t really know what to say. Help. Let’s get this done.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 22, 2016.